Illinois Department of Public Health
Expediting Research & Improving Public Health
The Challenge
The Right Partnership
The Optiform team is a proud partner of Verity, a leading provider of enterprise software that enables organizations to maximize the return on their intellectual capital investment. Today they proudly announced the Illinois Department of Health’s Division of Laboratories’ use of Verity TeleForm high volume content capture solution has dramatically improved the speed and accuracy of results from blood tests and other procedures relating to infectious and sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) gathered from facilities across the state. Optiform, a Verity partner, integrated the solution into the existing business systems infrastructure at Illinois Department of Public Health.
“Local and county health care centers and labs feed test findings into the Division of Laboratories’ three centers, in Carbondale, Chicago and Springfield,” said Pat Yohe, the division’s database manager. “These results involve a number of serious public health issues, including levels of lead in pediatric blood, STDs, SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) and the West Nile virus, a form of encephalitis. Accuracy of that data is critical for effective disease management and for proper analysis at both state and national levels.” The data gathered by the division is shared with the National Center for Disease Control to enable countrywide analysis of trends in these health areas.
Prior to the deployment of Verity TeleForm the process was entirely paper-based. Forms, with basic patient information often being completed by the individual being tested, would be sent to one of the three centers where optical mark reader (OMR) scanners digitized the forms for further processing and entry into the division’s database. “OMR did not permit verification of the content on the form. A lot of data and information, even with a bar code, was misread,” Yohe said. “Verity TeleForm with optical character recognition (OCR) capabilities allows us to verify the forms’ content, eliminating any machine-reading errors and time-consuming misinformation.”
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Name
Illinois Department of Public Health
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Location
Illinois, United States
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Industry
Government
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Solutions Implemented
Data Capture, Content Management
Faster Results, Better Service
With Verity TeleForm, the division can handle in a matter of hours the 1,200 forms generated each testing day, a process that often created work backlogs in the past that could run into several days. The number of tests conducted for infectious and STDs is significant, reflective of Illinois’ 12.4 million population and the high incidence of some of the diseases. For example, the division processes 30,000 tests for HIV (the Human Immunodeficiency Virus found to cause AIDS, Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome). The matter of speed and accuracy also came into play when the division had to conduct testing for possible anthrax infection, working in conjunction with Illinois Homeland Security and their national-level counterparts.
Our Solution. Their Results.
Streamlined Processes, Widespread Results
“The work of the Illinois Department of Public Health’s Division of Laboratories is crucial to the well-being of everyone in that state and the country,” said Anthony J. Bettencourt, Verity’s president and chief executive officer. “That work has been made more effective and efficient with the successful utilization of Verity TeleForm.”
The division is in the process of further upgrading its laboratory information management system, to further reduce its dependence on paper forms system. It is exploring the integration of Verity LiquidOffice, a powerful Web-based business process automation solution for creating, deploying and automatically managing the routing, tracking and approval processes for electronic forms.
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